Those who want greater equality should not stand in the way of devolution

One of the perennial objections to greater devolution of power away from the central state and down to cities and regions is the claim that it will damage equality. A classic of the genre was recently penned by The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee who wrote:

One of the perennial objections to greater devolution of power away from the central state and down to cities and regions is the claim that it will damage equality. A classic of the genre was recently penned by The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee who wrote:

The logic of localism risks leading in the end to less national identity and less fair distribution of wealth. Good politics will revive if strong ideas hold the imagination, keeping enough people together with common goals.

This is a version of what I described in a recent post as "big equality". This is the notion, which gained a firm grip in the twentieth century, that the best route to equality was for a powerful state to equalise incomes by redistributing the proceeds of the wealth and assets owned by the better off. It is fundamentally a remedial and conservative approach to achieving a more equal society. It takes as a given that current inequalities of wealth and economic power are very difficult or impossible to change and so the only route is to take some money from the well-off and hand it on to the less well-off.

If that sounds harsh, it is an assumption that runs through the centralist argument. As Polly Toynbee says:

Unlike more equal federal countries, England is so grotesquely unequal in geography and class that London and the south-east make all the money, the rest take it. Redistribution from the south must limit the scope for local tax-raising. The north-east, Cornwall or West Midlands may feel angrily alienated from Cameron’s government, but they can’t break away.

It makes the crucial point that for all the claims made for central redistribution, those places that were poor thirty years ago still remain poor today. I would argue that is an inevitable outcome of big equality which merely tries to ameliorate structural inequality rather than address the underlying imbalances of power and wealth that created the inequality in the first place.

By contrast the Commission report argues for an approach that gives cities and regions the necessary powers to deliver sustainable growth for themselves. Rather than rely on handouts from London and the South East, they have the tools to create prosperity in the most deprived parts of the UK and hopefully end the need for those handouts in the first place.

This is much closer to what I called "small equality': the idea that a vision of a more equal society is best served when we finds ways to share out wealth and ownership of assets more evenly rather than just redistribute the proceeds of that wealth.

Of course there will always be a requirement for some redistributive system but as the report argues when regions across the UK are growing, prosperous and own assets equivalent or close to those of London, then they can redistribute from their own wealthier areas or citizen to those who are in need.

It is sad that so many who claim to stand for a fairer economy have become so wedded to approaches that have failed to deliver for many years and which, in truth, belong to another era when the bureaucracy of the big state was regarded as the most potent force for human progress. It is time to move on and embrace a more radical vision that addresses the root causes of inequality rather than simply ameliorate the symptoms.

These themes amongst others will be explored in my book, Small is Powerful: Why the era of big government, big business and big culture is over (and why it’s a good thing). I’m crowd-funding for the book, so you can pre-order and help make sure it gets published here.

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